The opening scenes in Hereafter are well crafted, unexpected, and provide a solid foundation for what should have been an interesting movie. Unfortunately, there is an hour and a half wait before that interesting movie emerges and it isn't enough of a payoff to offset the interminable boredom.
The vast majority of the movie is spent following three very separate story lines about three very different people. The first is about a French reporter/TV host who has a near death experience after almost drowning and her life is changed forever. The second is about twin boys with a drug addicted mother and the third follows Matt Damon doing his best John Edwards impression (the guy that talks to dead people, not the one who cheats on his cancer patient wife). It's not that the stories are bad, but the movie does a very poor job of moving things along and for most of the movie there really isn't a coherent plot to speak of. It's like a reality TV show randomly picked three people to follow and you get to see how they live their lives, even though that might make good TV if you found the right people, it makes a really crappy movie.
Eventually the plot lines intersect when the reporter writes a book, Matt Damon goes on vacation, and one of the boys runs away from his foster parents. Matt Damon reads the reporter's book, sees that she really did die, talks to the boy's dead brother (he died earlier in the film), offers him comfort, receives some naive yet sagely advice from the boy, seeks out the reporter and falls in love. All of these elements would have fit very nicely into a short film and have to be painfully drawn out in order to fill two hours. The movie really needed to focus less on character development and way more on plot advancement.
The vast majority of the movie is spent following three very separate story lines about three very different people. The first is about a French reporter/TV host who has a near death experience after almost drowning and her life is changed forever. The second is about twin boys with a drug addicted mother and the third follows Matt Damon doing his best John Edwards impression (the guy that talks to dead people, not the one who cheats on his cancer patient wife). It's not that the stories are bad, but the movie does a very poor job of moving things along and for most of the movie there really isn't a coherent plot to speak of. It's like a reality TV show randomly picked three people to follow and you get to see how they live their lives, even though that might make good TV if you found the right people, it makes a really crappy movie.
Eventually the plot lines intersect when the reporter writes a book, Matt Damon goes on vacation, and one of the boys runs away from his foster parents. Matt Damon reads the reporter's book, sees that she really did die, talks to the boy's dead brother (he died earlier in the film), offers him comfort, receives some naive yet sagely advice from the boy, seeks out the reporter and falls in love. All of these elements would have fit very nicely into a short film and have to be painfully drawn out in order to fill two hours. The movie really needed to focus less on character development and way more on plot advancement.